This invention generally relates to social networking systems, and more particularly to maintaining a database of location information received from social networking system users.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. Additionally, users may provide a social networking system information specifying their current geographic locations or geographic locations they previously visited. This user location information may be presented to other social networking system users subject to user-specified privacy settings to enhance user interaction with the social networking system.
For example, a social networking system receives and stores information describing geographic locations from various users, creating a database of location information. To allow a user to more easily identify a geographic location, the social networking system allows a user to select information from the created database. Because users may use different terms to describe a physical location, various entries in the location database include terms providing different amounts of information about a physical location. However, because the information in the created database is provided by social networking system users, multiple entries in the database may differently refer to the same geographic location. This increases the complexity of a user selecting a geographic location by providing the user with different information associated with the geographic location.